So, your Android can do a million and one things: Email, Twitter, Facebook, GPS, Language Translation, Games, Camera, and you can even talk on it!
All of these things, but what’s the one thing you want it to do and it can’t?
Have a greater battery life!
Here are a few things you can do to help your battery life along:
Battery Test 1, 2, 3 …
It’s kind of difficult to know what exactly you should be doing to increase your battery life, if you don’t know what’s killing it the most. Go get Battery Graph, it’s free, it gets the job done and most importantly, its free. Did I mention it was free? Then, you can see what’s using your battery the most: Settings > About Phone > Battery.
This is so cool.
Screen Your Screen Use
Here you thought it was a good idea to get the biggest screen, and now it’s sucking the living daylights out of your battery. Go figure, right? That’s okay. Tweak it a little.
Brightness
Go to Settings > Display > Brightness and set it to “Automatic brightness”. Ya. It’s automatic. How cool is that! Smartphone is right! No need to have your back-light pushing hard when you have plenty of lighting, right?
Timeout
This is something that will require some trial and error. Be mindful of how long you need this thing to stay lit. Back in the day, I would tweak this setting on my not-very-smartphone and it made a big difference! Settings > Display > Screen timeout is how you get it done.
Sync Sucks (Your Battery)
As nice as it is to have Gmail, Twitter, Facebook and various apps automatically sync for updates, it turns your Android into a battery suck. With all these apps updating, your web connection is left on, so it’s ready to handle these different updates. But, you can fight back! Increase the amount of time between your updates. This should increase your battery life, and decrease your check-in addiction. It’s a win-win. In fact, one step better, is to turn off sync, so the only time an app updates, is when you manually request it to.
WiFi vs. 3G
Your 3G data connection is going to use more battery than your WiFi. So, if you’re in reach of WiFi, lose the mobile. Have WiFi at home or work? Switch over when you’re there! Also, you may have an option to use 2G only. If you do, and don’t mind the slower connection, you can save some battery. At least give it at try, you might be surprised!
Pretty
You’re battery is going to hate you for being beautiful. Pull it back a little. All the animated transitions, widgets and live wallpapers is going to pull on your battery. More than one home screen can use a lot of power, too, as well as some of those nifty app launchers.
Evil Apps
Some apps can really suck your resources. Just be careful. It might be fun to play that game before the board meeting, but it might not be worth it if you kill your battery. Keep an eye on apps.
Kill Task Killers
To be blunt, don’t use them! Unless you know what you’re doing, and there’s an app you have that constantly wastes your battery life, I recommend not using them. Android is built to have multiple apps running in the background; as long as the app is well-built there shouldn’t be a need to kill it. You’ll only waste more battery life if you kill regularly used applications too as they’ll have to start up again.
These are some basic things you can do with your Android to improve your battery life. There are some apps out there as well as some options for rooted phones, but I would try these simple things, first.
Now, that’s playing with power!
🙂
[via AppStorm]
Eric J says
I found that setting my brightness to a constant 50% or lower gets me better battery life as it is not as bright as it would have been with automatic brightness.
Eric Dye says
Thanks for the word, Eric!
wvpv says
I agree with everything you listed.
Battery monitoring apps will drain your battery real fast, too. I found that out with the Circle Battery Widget (http://market.android.com/details?id=fr.depoortere.android.CircleBatteryWidget)
Increasing battery life alone was the catalyst for rooting my Android phone.
By underclocking with usage profiles I can go two days between charges.
Eric J says
Hmm i use circle battery widget you think it is negatively affecting your battery life?
wvpv says
I read about it somewhere.
//crickets//
It made sense to me that if you have an app that’s checking the battery state in more frequent intervals than normal, it’s going to use quite a few cycles itself.
I will say that in my underclocking trials, I removed it and my battery life noticeably improved.
Eric Dye says
Wow! Awesome! Thanks for the info!